We live in a day and age where we take weather forecasts and hurricane tracking for granted. But what happened in the atmosphere above eastern North America a couple days ago is about to change that. The GOES-13 satellite which was launched on May 24, 2006 and has since been returning the gold standard satellite imagery for the east coast’s weather patterns ever since. The GOES-13 provides enough of a vast view that it is one of the primary hurricane watchers for the Atlantic Ocean. On September 12, 2012, GOES-13 began to vibrate wildly and started returning images with an excessive amount of noise. That noise eventually became so bad that the satellite was placed in standby mode on September 24th in order to allow engineers to diagnose the problem. GOES-15 temporarily provided backup imagery for a short time, but GOES 14 has since served as a replacement. Forecasts and hurricane tracking is expected to be compromised in the coming weeks, which means folks along the east coast will likely be experiencing some innacuracies in their forecasts. No word yet on when the problem will be fixed.
